Pasatiempo Golf Club

Perched on a hillside above Monterey Bay, Pasatiempo is the course Alister MacKenzie loved so much he built his home alongside the sixth fairway and lived there until his death in 1934. The routing asks for precise iron play into heavily contoured greens defended by deep, artfully placed bunkers, with several uphill par fours exceeding 400 yards that punch well above the scorecard's modest yardage. A two-year restoration completed in 2024 by Jim Urbina has returned every green and bunker to MacKenzie's original 1929 dimensions and contours.

Pasatiempo Golf Club owes its existence to a remarkable figures in early twentieth-century American sport: Marion Hollins. A champion golfer who won the 1921 U.S. Women's Amateur, an accomplished equestrian and polo player, and a pioneer of international women's athletics during an era when sports remained overwhelmingly male-dominated, Hollins possessed both the vision and the determination to create something extraordinary on the hills above Santa Cruz, California. On January 12, 1928, she announced plans for an ambitious real estate and sporting development that would include an eighteen-hole championship golf course, a clubhouse, swimming pool, tennis courts, steeplechase course, bridle paths, and a beach club on Monterey Bay. For the centerpiece of her vision -- the golf course -- Hollins recruited the most celebrated golf architect of the age: Dr. Alister MacKenzie. MacKenzie, a native of Leeds, England, who had trained as a physician before devoting himself to golf architecture, was at the height of his creative powers when he arrived at Pasatiempo. He had recently completed Cypress Point Club on the Monterey Peninsula and was soon to begin his collaboration with Bobby Jones on Augusta National Golf Club. The site Hollins offered him was spectacular: rolling hills of sand overlooking Monterey Bay, with natural elevation changes, mature vegetation, and a network of deep ravines -- called barrancas -- that cut dramatically through the landscape. MacKenzie recognized immediately that these barrancas could serve as the architectural backbone of the course, providing natural hazards, strategic dilemmas, and visual drama without any need for artificial construction. The course officially opened on September 8, 1929, with a grand celebration that drew more than 2,000 spectators. The inaugural foursome was extraordinary by any standard in golf history: Marion Hollins herself, Bobby Jones (the reigning titan of competitive golf), Glenna Collett (the U.S. Women's Amateur Champion), and Cyril Tolley (the British Amateur Champion). Among the celebrities in attendance were Alister MacKenzie, golf instructor Ernest Jones, and the legendary sportswriter Grantland Rice. Pasatiempo was the last great golf course of the Roaring Twenties, opening just six weeks before the stock market crash that ushered in the Great Depression. MacKenzie was so taken with Pasatiempo and the surrounding landscape that he built his home beside the 6th fairway, where he lived from 1929 until his death on January 6, 1934. During those final four years of his life, MacKenzie was constantly tweaking and tinkering with the course, refining green contours, adjusting bunker placements, and perfecting the strategic puzzles he had embedded in each hole. He considered Pasatiempo his finest creation -- a claim he made even after completing both Cypress Point and Augusta National. After his death, MacKenzie was cremated, and his ashes were scattered by airplane over the 16th green of his home course on a California winter's day in 1934, a final tribute to the place he loved most.6 and a slope of 139. These modest dimensions belie the course's extraordinary difficulty. MacKenzie refined at Pasatiempo the formula he would later apply at Augusta National: stiff par-3s that demand both precision and nerve, chess-like par-4s where positioning off the tee dictates the quality of the approach, and heroic par-5s that offer risk-and-reward choices on every shot. He emphasized the importance of roll, creating subtle defenses through mounding, trapping, and green contours rather than relying on length or forced carries. He routed the course so that golfers play over the hills and into them rather than through winding valleys, ensuring that the terrain is always visible and always engaging. The back nine at Pasatiempo is widely regarded as one of the great finishing stretches in American golf, and the barrancas are the unifying theme. The barranca arteries that wind across the surface of the final nine holes are used in seven different holes on the inward side, creating a recurring hazard that must be confronted from different angles, distances, and elevations. The 11th is a sharply uphill 384-yard par-4 with a green positioned sixty yards left of the ideal driving line and across a winding barranca. A dead-straight and lengthy drive leaves an uphill mid-iron across the ravine to an elegantly defended green site -- a hole that tests every aspect of a golfer's game. The 16th hole was MacKenzie's personal favorite -- not just at Pasatiempo, but in all of golf. Playing 395 yards, it begins in a valley with a sharply uphill drive that must draw expertly to the left around a blind corner. From there, the golfer faces a mid-iron across a chasm to a huge expanse of green draped over the slope. Short and left leads into the barranca; short and right finds a punishing bunker. Anything above the hole leaves a putt that may well roll off the green entirely. It is a hole of immense strategic complexity and visual beauty, and it is fitting that MacKenzie's ashes rest on its green. For decades after MacKenzie's death, the course underwent gradual changes that dulled some of its original brilliance. Trees were planted that narrowed fairways and obscured sightlines, bunkers were allowed to shrink or were grassed over entirely, and greens lost their original dimensions and contours. In the early 1990s, club historian Robert Beck uncovered a trove of old and decaying photographic slides by famed photographer Julian Graham, showing details of Pasatiempo that had not been seen in decades. These images sparked a comprehensive restoration effort. In 1996, the club engaged architect Tom Doak and his associate Jim Urbina of Renaissance Golf Design to lead the restoration. At the time, Doak had not yet achieved the international fame he enjoys today, but his reverence for MacKenzie's work and his commitment to preserving original design intent made him the ideal choice. Doak articulated two core principles for the restoration: add nothing foreign to the original design, and enhance the "pleasurable excitement" that MacKenzie had sought to provide. The work proceeded over a period of years to keep the course in play throughout, a painstaking approach that ensured each intervention was guided by historical evidence rather than modern convention. By the project's completion in the fall of 2007, Doak and Urbina had restored thirty-six bunkers -- most dramatically a large cross bunker on the uphill 214-yard 3rd hole -- that had been grassed over, rebuilt several others, removed more than fifty trees, and recontoured the greens while enlarging all eighteen putting surfaces by a total of 26,000 square feet. The 16th green was enlarged and its dramatic bunkering near the barranca was extended to match MacKenzie's original drawings. In 2023, the club contracted with Jim Urbina Golf Design for a further restoration to the original 1929 MacKenzie specifications, a project completed in December 2024 that represents the most comprehensive return to the architect's vision in the course's history. Pasatiempo holds the distinction of being the truest to its original design of any MacKenzie course in the world. It has hosted the Western Intercollegiate tournament for decades and is annually recognized among the top 100 courses in the country, regularly appearing in top rankings from Golf Magazine and Golf Digest. Notably, Pasatiempo is a public-access course -- a distinguished available to all golfers -- ranked 11th in Golf Magazine's Top 100 Courses You Can Play and 15th in Golf Digest's America's Greatest Public Courses. This accessibility ensures that MacKenzie's genius is not locked behind gates but available to any golfer willing to make the pilgrimage to Santa Cruz. With MacKenzie's home still standing beside the 6th fairway and his ashes resting on the 16th green, Pasatiempo is not merely a golf course but a shrine to the art of golf architecture, a place where the spirit of its creator endures in every contour, every barranca, and every strategic challenge he placed upon these rolling California hills.